All eyes were on Wall Street this afternoon as software giant and new hardware vendor Oracle reported sales of $6.4bn for its third quarter of fiscal 2010 ended in February, up 17 per cent from the year ago period. However, thanks to its $7.4bn acquisition of Sun Microsystems, which happened a month before the end of the quarter, Oracle booked $34m in acquisition costs and had $306m in restructuring charges and that helped push net income down 10 per cent to $1.19bn.

An Apple patent application published Thursday describes a variety of techniques for capturing light from external sources to either replace or supplement traditional backlighting of electronic-device displays.

Alone among the printers in this group test, the OKI machine uses strips of high-intensity LEDs to illuminate its photoconductor drums, rather than laser beams. This makes for a simpler design, though in this case the machine is deeper from front to back than most.

Tall and black, this big, square Dell cube makes its presence felt on the desk. Paper feeds from a decent-capacity, 250-sheet paper tray and there’s a single-sheet multipurpose feed, too. The control panel is simple, but includes warning LEDs built into a useful schematic of the printer.

This is a squat machine, cased all in white, with a simple, LED-filled status panel. It has a single paper tray, holding just 150 sheets, which isn’t a lot if you print frequently. There’s a multi-feed slot for envelopes and other media.

On price alone, you might think there’d be no contest between inkjets and colour laser printers, but the strength of the latter lies in areas other than the monetary bottom line. The key advantages are all results of the technology itself: cleaner quality print, more robust documents and higher print speed.

Laser printer have been hit hard by the rise of inkjet machines in the last ten years or so. Excellent inkjet print quality, especially in colour and on photo paper, caused many pundits to predict that was it for the laser - and the colour laser in particular.

The Lads from Lagos have struck again, this time posing online as US servicemen at war overseas in order to become "romantically involved" with American women fond of a man in uniform and then "prey on their emotions and patriotism".

Although unified communications (UC) still has some way to go before it achieves mainstream adoption, businesses increasingly understand what it is and what it can deliver in terms of benefits to the business.

Let's start with the obvious: there was never a poor bald geek's chance with a supermodel that IBM was ever going to willingly license its z/OS and related systems software so it could run on the commercialized version of the open source Hercules mainframe hardware emulator for x64 iron.

In the world of the serious superzoom bridge cameras, Samsung’s WB5000 is currently the company’s only fully-loaded model. It sports an 24x f/2.8–5.0 zoom lens, a 12Mp sensor with with RAW mode shooting and 720p HD video recording. It also features dual optical and digital image stabilisation, two user-defined shooting modes and the classic aperture, speed priority or full manual mode.

After months lost in a jungle of its own creation, Phorm, the much-maligned internet monitoring and profiling outfit, today emerged with new hopes its technology and the tens of millions spent on it might bring some return.

A look at how much old Apple products would cost if they were released today doesn't quite show what it hopes to - that the iPad is very good value - but it does provide an interesting insight into the economics of technology.

An eleven-story-high helium balloon used for aerial parties and sightseeing has crashed to the ground and been destroyed by a storm in Las Vegas, fortunately with no-one on board. The owners intend to offer visitors a petting zoo while a replacement balloon is constructed.

As new ideas and technologies emerge and develop in IT, we typically go through a maturity curve. Lots of problems are reported in the early days as a result of unproven products and lack of market ‘know how’ which gradually disappear over time as offerings become more robust, experience is gained, and best practices are defined.

One of the largest US intellectual-property firms has acquired an "obscenely broad" patent that may cause migraines among the legal teams at Apple, Google, Palm, Motorola, NTC, and other smartphone makers.